In the aftermath of the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks
on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, and more broadly in the wake of the end of the
Cold War, the United States has been going through a major rethinking of its defense
policy agenda. Preventing a nuclear attack on the United States might earlier have been
thought to be much easier once communist rule in Moscow had been ended; but securing the
American homeland against mass destruction has now seemingly become much more complicated,
amid the prospect that nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction may fall into the
hands of people far less easy to deter than were the communist leaders in the Kremlin.

If deterrence is to
be more difficult, a physical defense of the American homeland may again have a higher
priority, amid a debate on whether such defenses can ever be effective enough and a great
uncertainty about what kinds of delivery vehicles would be used by someone trying to
destroy an American city. And, if such defenses can not be effective enough, it may
then seem necessary that the United States strike preemptively whenever an
adversarys attack is about to be launched.

As was the case all
through the Cold War, such considerations of protecting the United States against mass
destruction must also be balanced against the importance of protecting Americas
allies against such destruction, and against the more traditional risks of conventional
warfare, the risks that peoples would be conquered against their will, that territorial
aggressions might succeed, while the threat of mass destruction remained unexecuted in the
background.

The world indeed has
had to wrestle with the risk of mass destruction ever since nuclear weapons were
introduced at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the problems of ordinary warfare still persisted
over the ensuing four and a half decades of the Cold War. The collapse of the Warsaw Pact
and of the Soviet Union spurred many analysts to conclude that such normal conventional
warfare might finally be put on the historical shelf, with the US military having to turn
to a host of new and nontraditional missions; but this conclusion might once again turn
out to be premature, just as when South Korea was invaded in June of 1950.

And finally, exactly
as in the years of the Cold War, the policy process on US national defense will be subject
to a continuing skepticism and scrutiny as to whether all the money being spent on defense
is really necessary, as to whether there is not some process of bureaucratic
politics at work whereby the Pentagon is seeking to find an enemy to justify
increases in its budget, whereby the putative manufacturers of anti-missile defense
systems are exaggerating the effectiveness of their product in the pursuit of enormous
profits.

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The five books
reviewed here are spread nicely across this array of issues, illustrating how experienced
analysts of US defense policy can attach priority to very different portions of the
national defense problem, and can emerge with conflicting answers.

We might begin with
the seeming novelty and salience of the vulnerability of the American homeland to physical
attack as of 11 September 2001. As noted, the newness of this vulnerability can easily be
overstated. A historically-aware American might remember that Washington was occupied by
the British in 1814, with the Capitol and the White House being put to the torch, and with
Baltimore being besieged, and one might similarly remember the German-instigated explosion
at the Black Tom dock just across the Hudson River from New York City in 1915
(the largest explosion to rock Manhattan until the 9/11 attack). The newly independent US
Air Force was certainly reminding Americans as early as 1949 that they were now physically
vulnerable to a Soviet air attack, urging people to think of a polar-projection map rather
than a Mercator projection, as Nebraska might now be just as vulnerable to attack as
Maryland or New York.

The real novelty is
thus not that America is so open against weapons of mass destruction, but that such
weapons may come into the hands of political movements or individuals who cannot be easily
retaliated against, who cannot be deterred. We are required now to consider the wide array
of deadly technologies that have settled into place around the globe, and also the many
points of fragility and vulnerability around our homeland that might let such deadly
technologies be brought to bear.

Joseph
Cirinciones Deadly Arsenals: Tracking Weapons of Mass Destruction is a very
valuable and readable survey of the first half of this problem, of the physical array of
deadly weapons that can be directed against the American people in the immediate future.
It offers the reader a comprehensive introduction to the threats we face, and also to the
various efforts and regimes that have been directed against such deadly proliferation.
Published early in 2002, the book fairly obviously was composed earlier in the previous
year; it has a quick reference to the 11 September 2001 terrorist attack, noting how the
deadly utilization of airliners has to broaden our definitions of weapons of mass
destruction, but the text is focused mainly on what governmentscan do with
such weapons.

On the other half of
this same basic problem, Protecting the American Homeland: A Preliminary Analysis,
by Michael E. OHanlon and a panel of authors brought together by the Brookings
Institution, presents a thoughtful survey of the weak points in the American homeland, the
points at which terrorists or ordinary states, perhaps using the very deadly weapons
cataloged by Cirincione, perhaps using nothing more dedicated to weapon purposes than the
jet passenger aircraft of the 9/11 attacks, can inflict serious damage on the United
States.

A first reading of
the Brookings collection almost produces the wish that it had not been published, lest it
be too suggestive to erstwhile terrorists or other enemies, too valuable as a catalog of
North American weak points. Yet it would surely be smug for an American to assume that our
enemies had not already been engaged in such research on their own, that terrorists would
not have thought of any particular avenue of attack if Americans had not begun an analysis
of how to prevent that attack.

The Brookings study
advocates substantial expenditures on remedying many of the weaknesses it spots, and hence
will not reinforce the skeptics who scoff at defense spending requests and anticipate
major budget cuts here. It eschews getting into an analysis of the pros and cons of a
national missile defense (NMD) system, instead discussing in

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detail the many
other ways a deadly warhead could be delivered to North America besides by a ballistic
missile.

The argument for or
against missile defense, to be discussed further below, is thus related in a complicated
way to 9/11. The terrorist attacks on New York and Washington indeed showed how many otherways an adversary could attack the United States. What is the point of reinforcing the
front door if the back door has no lock at all? But the 9/11 attacks also prove that there
are groups in this world who would indeed do great harm to the United States if they
could, who would fire a ballistic missile at an American city as soon as they laid their
hands on it. If one is going to reinforce the back door, does this suggest that the front
door should not be made as strong as possible?

The Brookings book
was entirely written after the 9/11 attack, and hence is very much in step with the pace
of the news. In congratulating the Bush Administration for not trying to establish a new
Cabinet-level department to deal with homeland defense, it comes across as a bit
out-of-step with the most recent events, as the Administration, in part in face of
opposition criticism in the Congress for doing too little to respond to the new threats,
has come around to the idea of a new department. But the analysis presented by the chapter
on Organizing for Success, drafted by Ivo Daalder and Mac Destler, very neatly
anticipates some of the difficulties that have emerged in the debate on a new department,
as to what is to be included and what is not.

Included in the
Brookings book are several wise discussions of the civilian-government interface, of how
some of the hardening of targets against future terrorist attack will have to emerge when
crucial decisions are made by commercial shippers on new technological standards, etc.
Also opened for discussion is what may be one of the most profound issues of all for
Americans as they have to deal with future dimensions of national defense, the issue of
private rights and civil liberties, as it may become much more necessary now for the
government to keep track of who is in the country legitimately and who is not; it may even
become necessary for all of us to carry identity cards.

While the Brookings
book addresses itself to all the rest of the North American defense problem aside from
missile defense, Bradley Grahams Hit to Kill offers a fascinating and
comprehensive overview of the technological challenges, and the procedural handling, of
the missile defense issue in particular, a set of choices that would have been subject to
lively debate even if the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon had
never occurred. The book indeed spans a fair amount of history, our entire experience with
ballistic missiles since the World War II German V-2, and recounts the various rounds of
optimism or pessimism since then about whether such missiles could be intercepted and
stopped en route to their targets.

Based on interviews
with a great number of the key players, the book delves deeply into the process of the
decisions that were made, tracing out the political and economic considerations that have
produced support or opposition for such projects. Grahams book is very readable for
its discussion of the technical issues, the bureaucratic in-fighting, and the strategic
choices that have been at play here. The history of the various tests run on missile
defenses is recounted, alongside the debates about the validity of such tests.

The book obviously
had been completed and was just about to go to press on 9/11. An Afterword, taking the
terrorist attack into account, is attached. It notes some of the basic connections
mentioned just above, by which missile defense might have to be relegated in importance
because other avenues for attack have been demonstrated, or by which the reverse might be
true, as deep enmities in general had been thus demonstrated, perhaps

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suggesting that all
the avenues of attack now needed to be blocked, even if this required substantially
greater allocations of tax dollars.

Grahams
account deals somewhat in passing with the arguments against missile defenses that had
seemed persuasive to many of us during the Cold War, arguments by which it was perhaps
even desirable for Americans to be vulnerable to a Soviet second-strike missile attack,
because this would keep the Soviet leaders from becoming too nervous, during a crisis,
about the possibility of an American first-strike attack.

Some analysts might
conclude that such concerns for Moscows possible nervousness are no longer
important, now that the Cold War is over and Russia is a democracy. But A New Nuclear
Century, by Stephen Cimbala and James Scouras, takes a much more cautious stand on
this question, arguing that the strategic stability of the post-Cold War nuclear
confrontation cannot be taken for granted, and that it would be foolish to analyze choices
on strategic missile defenses only in terms of the new countries coming into the
possession of weapons of mass destruction.

Do the new
considerations of homeland defense thus totally replace the Cold War considerations of
maintaining strategic stability between the two nuclear superpowers, and of maintaining
some extended nuclear deterrence to reinforce the safety of NATO and South Korea? As
Cimbala and Scouras ably argue, these earlier demands on defense policy may still be very
important, even if the new century has added a host of other demands to be satisfied. The
authors do not limit themselves to the American-Russian confrontation, as they include a
chapter on the further proliferation of nuclear weapons and other weapons of mass
destruction, and what this can mean for nuclear stability.

Finally, the impact
of weapons of mass destruction, nuclear or otherwise, was never total even during the Cold
War, and will not be total now, for battles still may be fought around the world in which
the threat of massive civilian losses will only hang in the distant background, in which
the dominant considerations would be the same as before Hiroshimawho destroys whose
military forces, and who gets to occupy territory. Such were the considerations in Desert
Storm, of course, when Saddam Husseins Iraqi forces had to be pushed back out of
Kuwait, and such would be the dominant considerations if military force has to push all
the way to Baghdad in this new century.

The Technological
Arsenal, edited by William Martel, presents a wide-ranging survey of the new military
technologies that may or may not give the United States an important edge in all of such
warfare. Some of the technologies discussed will be relevant to strategic missile defense,
of course, and to superpower interactions with nuclear and other weapons of mass
destruction, and a few might be quite relevant to the repulsing of terrorism (or they
might even facilitate terrorismthis book was in press already before 9/11). But the
thrust of the bulk of this book is indeed directed to battlefield capabilitiesthe US
capabilities that made the intervention against the Taliban so surprisingly effective, the
US capabilities that Chinese and Russian commentators often claim to fear.

The book is
extremely good in laying out these new technologies in terms intelligible to the layman,
and it opens up a number of the debates about the feasibility of various approaches,
noting and admitting the possible drawbacks and counters. It is up-to-date as of the
summer of 2001; but, given how fast the technologies are evolving, it could quickly enough
be behind the curve, even without the events of 11 September 2001. A skeptic about defense
spending, or a traditionalist in military analysis, might accuse the authors of being
guilty of the American fascination with high technology, but the presentation of the
choices comes across as generally level-headed, with little that reads like hyperbole.

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The authors in the
Martel collection might have been encouraged to speculate further about whether the
technological trends will work to maintain an American advantage in the future vis-à-vis
the military forces of other powers, or whether the advantage here is in the end more
likely to be handed back and forth, and on whether these trends are likely to favor the
offensive, the side taking the initiative to launch combat, or instead to favor the
defense, rewarding the side waiting in place to be attacked.

Replete with detail
and arguments that are ably presented for the reader, the five books are worth the
attention of anyone concerned with Americas defense as it has had to be redefined.
As noted, these works do not really duplicate or substitute for each other, as each of
them covers a different portion of the problems, and offers a slightly different sense of
what the total defense problem will now be.

The Reviewer: Dr.
George Quester is Professor of Government & Politics at the University of Maryland. He
is a graduate of Columbia College, MIT, and Harvard (M.A., Ph.D.), and also has taught at
Cornell, Harvard, UCLA, the National War College, and the US Naval Academy. The most
recent of his books is Nuclear Monopoly (Transaction Books, 2000).